“Europe has a serious free speech problem. Instead of taking ever more measures to punish their citizens for what they say, it’s time for countries from Germany to Britain to abolish the deeply illiberal legislation they have, with little attention from the press or the public, introduced over the course of the last decades. To live up to the most basic values of the democracies that are now under threat, the continent needs to reverse course—and restore true freedom of speech.”
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Apple is doing the public a service in challenging the government on this important matter of principle. Encryption enables more than just ‘secure’ communication – it ensures freedom from government snooping, too. That’s why privacy and freedom of expression have long been considered mutually reinforcing rights. Encryption protects not only personal data, but also the ability of journalists and human-rights activists to operate without fear of surveillance or reprisals. Compelling companies to pre-emptively weaken those protections risks chilling users’ ability to communicate freely, share sensitive information or challenge the powers-that-be. LOL Remember this? April 24th, 2025 | 7 comments
 Democracy tends towards protectionism when those harmed by free trade are numerous enough to count. But democracy also demands cheap goods. No one has yet squared that circle. April 23rd, 2025 | 16 comments
Like most people, I haven’t tuned in to Have I Got News For You for years. But when I heard of a staggering omission in last Friday night’s edition, I just had to see it – or, rather, not see it – with my own eyes. The biggest news story of the week – the momentous ruling by the Supreme Court on the meaning of sex in the Equality Act 2010 – was not covered at all, even obliquely. You’d think that the absurdity of the highest court in the land being called to adjudicate on one of the most basic facts of observable reality – that there are two sexes, and that the words man and woman mean, er, man and woman – would be a rich source of mirth, the kind of glorious nonsense that’s a satirist’s meat and drink. But no. Not a word. Zilch. ‘We begin with the bigger stories of the week,’ said guest host Katherine Parkinson, as is traditional. These turned out to be steel nationalisation and the bin strike in Birmingham. We also heard about the Blue Origin ‘mission’, gambling on the election date, Liz Truss launching her own app. But the thing everybody was actually talking about? No. That just hung in the air like a vicar’s fart, with everybody pretending it hadn’t happened. – Gareth Roberts (£) April 22nd, 2025 | 11 comments
What’s more, the imposition of punitive tariffs on poorer countries like Vietnam will simply impoverish rather than improve the potential importing power of these countries. Disrupting the economic development of poorer countries isn’t going to improve the chances of selling to them. The irony is brutal. Trump’s fixation with trade-deficit “offenders” is punishing the very nations that could one day erase those deficits through development and prosperity. US consumers, businesses, and economic growth will all suffer as a result of the US president’s inability to grasp this elementary logic. There seems to be just one long-term strategy behind all this: unleash populism for immediate electoral returns, blame someone else for the problems that populism inevitably causes, and let someone else deal with the long-term consequences. April 20th, 2025 | 42 comments
In the Guardian, April O’Neill writes,
April O’Neill holds that the people who need to be forcibly protected from hearing bad opinions are old people who distrust left wing media sources. Ms O’Neill is the winner of The Guardian Foundation’s 2025 Emerging Voices Awards (19-25 age category) recognising young talent in political opinion writing. April 19th, 2025 | 18 comments
Of all the most pointless organisations in history, the Soviet Union’s Central Election Commission must be amongst the funniest. In the run-up to election day, CEC would be tasked with the important job of formally approving candidates. Fortunately for them, the Communist Party was happy to take on most of the work. On election day, the Commission would ensure that all processes were properly followed, dutifully noting down the names of any dissenters or abstainers. And, in the wake of the election, the CEC would rigorously audit the conduct of the election, invariably concluding that each poll was an unrivalled triumph of Soviet democracy. It was striking to read the Home Affairs Committee’s recent report into the Southport riots, which adopted much the same tone. The report condemned fears about two-tier policing as “disgraceful”, denying outright the notion that officers were more heavy-handed when responding to right-wing protests. This will raise eyebrows for anybody who can remember the summer of 2020, when Black Lives Matter protests turned violent in cities across the UK, following the death of George Floyd. Often, the police stood by and watched the disorder — a far cry from their response to post-Southport rioting. April 18th, 2025 | 9 comments
“Perhaps the greatest paradox of all is that parts of the Maga movement are embracing a form of Right-wing wokery, with their own dark conspiracy theories, cult of victimhood, identity politics, denial of reality, moral grandstanding, hypersensitivity and purity tests. “In this vein, whingeing about trade deficits deserves to be dismissed as critical trade theory’, as Trumpian corollary of critical race theory: it postulates, nonsensically, that any shortfall must be caused by unfair practices, oppression or historic injustice. The ‘woke Right,’ a term coined by James Lindsay, is almost as much of a turn-off as the original Left-wing variety.” – Allister Heath, Daily Telegraph (£) He gives Mr Trump high marks on taking the fight vs DEI, some of the DOGE cuts (with a few caveats), and on energy policy (which in my view is Trump’s ace in the hole). But the broader point Heath makes about where he thinks Trump/Maga is losing it, including this nifty term of Heath’s, “critical trade theory”, is absolutely spot-on. It is, in my view, one of the big blinds spots of today’s populist Right and threatens to undo the good things that a Trump 2.0 might achieve, which would be bad not just for the US, but the West in general. As Heath goes on to write (and remember, he’s a pro-Brexit, free market chap, and not some obdurate Never Trumper), a course correction is needed. And Trump is not incapable of it. April 17th, 2025 | 52 comments
“Liberal operatives planted ‘stop the steal’ buttons at conservative conference” reports the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). By “buttons” they mean what we in the UK call “badges”.
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To be fair, the staffer’s confident assumption that any Canadian journalist listening would prefer to share in the laughter of the in-group at putting one over the Conservatives rather than report the deception to the public was reasonable given past form. Kudos to Kate McKenna of CBC News for proving him wrong.
So the culprits have been fired, then? No. Just reassigned. Ms McKenna’s report finishes with a Conservative spokesperson saying, “One wonders what other dirty tricks the Liberals are behind”. That was my first thought too. Remember those swastikas and confederate flags seen at Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ that Justin Trudeau was so outraged about? While I have no doubt that there were genuine extremists and nutters among the truckers of the Freedom Convoy, as there are in any large political movement, it is perfectly reasonable to wonder whether the Liberal Party was playing the same sort of tricks in 2022 as it was in 2025. A Liberal Party staffer happily boasting in public about having planted fake political emblems to discredit opponents of his party suggests that it is an accepted practice in his subculture. April 16th, 2025 | 4 comments
“It’s time to pay kidney donors”, writes Jeremiah Johnson in The Dispatch. He’s wrong. It’s long since past time. Six years ago, Mr Johnson altruistically donated one of his kidneys to someone who was at that time a stranger. That is admirable. It is also quite rare.
Mr Johnson outlines some of the objections to paying kidney donors:
Probably more than I do, but even I acknowledge that the possibility of someone donating a kidney to get out of an immediate financial hole but regretting it later is real. But something similar is true of any consequential decision in life. The only way to make people safe from regretting their decisions would be to take away their control over their own lives. And, as Mr Johnson movingly describes in the next few paragraphs, the human beings currently desperately waiting for a kidney who would be given decades more life (and a life free of the constraints of dialysis) if the number of available kidneys was increased, are also real. The “icky” thing I mentioned in the title to this post is not donating a kidney. It is allowing someone else to profit by selling one. April 16th, 2025 | 23 comments
In the comments to my previous post, Zerren Yeoville was inspired by the Pogues’ 1987 classic Fairytale of New York to pen the following lines for Birmingham in its current travails:
The rats as big as cats were also mentioned in the Sun‘s headline today:
Lest anyone think the Sun is being melodramatic, the BBC’s headline does not merely feature cat-sized rats but cat-sized rats who have begun their insurrection against humanity: NickM also provided commentary in verse on the Birmingham bin strike, but, unless I have misunderstood, that one was written by A.I. so it doesn’t count. Gosh, ChatGPT is getting alarmingly good. April 14th, 2025 | 28 comments
‘Rayner calls in Army to tackle Birmingham bin crisis’, the Telegraph reports:
If such a scaling-up does prove necessary, Ms Rayner can cite the example of one of the most revered of Labour leaders:
OK, the parallel between Attlee’s summoning of the Army and Rayner’s is not close, and I made it mostly to poke fun at present day lefties, whose hymns of praise to Attlee usually leave out the verse about him using the army to break a strike, and always omit the one about him being the father of the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. A better historical parallel to explain Ms Rayner’s distinct lack of solidarity with the striking binmen would be the 1978-9 “Winter of Discontent”. April 13th, 2025 | 9 comments
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